Here's how to get the requested structure using
XML::LibXML.
#! /usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use XML::LibXML;
my $dom = 'XML::LibXML'->load_xml(location => shift);
my %struct;
for my $ref ($dom->findnodes('/root/ref')) {
for my $child ($ref->findnodes('*')) {
push @{ $struct{ $ref->{name} }{ $child->nodeName } },
{ map { $_->nodeName => $_->value } $child->findnodes('@*
+') };
}
}
use Data::Dumper; print Dumper \%struct;
But converting from XML::Simple to XML::LibXML usually changes the code much more. You can extract only the information you need from the XML, so you don't need to build the whole structure at all.
map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]